The Pre-selling Process is Vitally Important
I had an understanding of it, I went to college and majored in Business Management with Marketing emphasis. Well, bookwork is one thing and the real world is another thing.
Went I got out of college, I worked as a salesman for Best Buy. I didn’t give the whole sales process much thought. All I was concerned with was talking to someone, gaining their interest and closing them. That is about all that I really thought about, but there was a lot more to it.
You see, Best Buy, just like any other business that sells products has a pre-sell campaign in place. They spend millions of dollars on it every year. I saw their commercials and their ads, that they sent out, but I didn’t think about it much.
I think that the reason I didn’t concern myself with it is because I wasn’t involved with it. It wasn’t my job. My job was to sell people, in the store, when they came.
I thought that I was doing a lot of the work. I was personally selling them because of my talent as a salesman. That was all true, but plenty of them had experienced a sense of pre-selling before they ever even walked in the store.
Sure, some of them were just casual shoppers and were just walking by and I pitched them and sold them, but most of them had seen some form of advertising for similar products that I was pitching to them. They had probably come to my section of the store because they had seen an ad somewhere.
So what is so different about the sales process when you’re running your own online business. The answer is, not much of anything, the only differences are that it takes place online and that a lot of times, you’re responsible for it.
That is the big difference. When you’re running your own online business, you either need to be in charge of the pre-selling process or hire someone to be in charge of it. If you want to sell a product online. Having a good pre-selling campaign cannot be understated. You’re going to have a much better conversion rate with that process in place, believe me.
Using Testimonials the Most Effective Ways
I see a ton of sales pages. I see as many as I can, not because I’m constantly consuming, but because I’m ALWAYS looking for ways to improve my copy writing.
I’m always looking for new strategies to improve my sales copy. The best way to do that is to always be on the search for new ideas. Sure, I can come up with my own ideas and I do, but I get just as many ideas from other people as do by thinking of them myself.
One of the ideas that I get from other copywriters is how they present their testimonials. Customers provide the testimonials and we obviously can’t do much to augment what they say.
There are a couple things that a copywriter can do. One is to highlight or underline certain points in the testimonial to make them stand out. There is one method that I have noticed that is very effective.
Most people that use testimonials on their sales pages will have a box and say testimonial on the top of it and have the testimonial and it is really basic. What you should do instead of having these boring, here is a testimonial headline, is to engage the reader with the best part of the testimonial as the title.
There are many reasons why this is very effective. For one, if you have a bunch of testimonials, people might not take the time to read them. If they see that headline, they at least read that and that is positive momentum towards your sale.
Lets face it. There are a ton of people that skim a sales page. If they are skimming a sales page and you have these headlines from on your customers instead of the boring testimonial title, people are going to notice that.
Another thing that can be very effective is the placement of the testimonials. Don’t just lump them all together, which screams to the reader, boring and go ahead and just skim or skip them all together.
Use your testimonials to illustrate points. Make sure to make a point about your product and if possible, use a testimonial right after that point to help illustrate it and re-enforce it.
Why You Should Learn Better Copy Writing Right Now!
Who wants to wait that long to start raking in money? I sure as heck don’t!
You are also costing yourself money because a higher conversion rate equals more sales, which in turn equals more money. There are a lot of things that go into a successful launch.
Having a great product, getting targeted traffic, having a bunch of affiliates etc., but one of the most important things is to have a high converting sales page. So many people focus on getting more targeted traffic and getting more affiliates and that is all well and good, but they forget about improving their sales page.
Lets say that you’re sending 100 people a day to your sales page without any affiliates. Lets also say that you’re selling a $47 product. If you’re converting at 1%, you’re only making $47 a day, which is probably less minus transaction fees or by what you may pay for advertising. Not very attractive, to say the least.
There are some other problems. I don’t think that very many affiliates will want to promote a sales page that is converting at the percentage and price, even if you’re offering a good percentage of the sale.
Another problem is that you can get more traffic to your sales page, but that will either take more money or a lot more time. Spending more money on pay-per click advertising on a poor converting sales page can get you broke in a hurry.
One thing that is free and may not take much time or effort is to improve your sales page. Just think if you can improve your conversion rate from 1% to 2%. You can double your sales without spending a dime. You can also spend more money promoting your product and attract more affiliates at the same time.
People will tell me, yeah but, you have to completely scrap the sales page and rewrite everything. That is far from the truth in a lot of cases. A small change to a vital part of your sales page can be huge.
Maybe just changing your main headline will greatly increase your conversion rate. If you can’t get their interest initially, you’ll never get it at all. Maybe you have no social proof or poor testimonials, maybe you just don’t close hard enough or provide enough ease in the transaction process. All factors that can determine the success or failure of your sales page.
